The Giant's Robe

Caffyn's smile meant mischief as he said: 'Mr. Holroyd has every right to be here, my dear Mrs. Featherstone, as you'll allow when I tell you who he is. He has too much diffidence to assert himself. Mr. Ashburn has admitted that he did not write "Illusion: " he might have added that he stole the book in a very treacherous and disgraceful way. I am sorry to use words of this sort, but when you know all, you will understand that I have some excuse. Mr. Holroyd can tell you the story better than I can: he is the man who has been wronged, the real author of "Illusion"!'

'I've done him a good turn there,' he thought; 'he can't very well turn against me after that!'

A terrible silence followed his words; Vincent's brain whirled, he could think of nothing. Mabel was the first to move or speak: she went to Mark's side as he stood silent and alone before his accuser, and touched his arm. 'Mark,' she said in an agonised whisper, 'do you hear? … tell them … it is not true – oh, I can't believe it – I won't – only speak!'

Vincent's heart swelled with a passionate devotion for her as she raised her fair face, blanched and stricken with an agony of doubt and hope, to her husband's averted eyes. How she loved him. What would he not have given for love like that? His own feelings were too true and loyal, however, to wish even for a moment to see the love and faith die out of her face, slain for ever by some shameful confession.

Was it too late to save her even now? His brain cleared suddenly – a way of escape had opened to him.

In the meantime two newcomers had entered. Mr. Featherstone, hearing voices, had brought up Mr. Langton, who had 'looked in' on his way from the House, and for some time remained under the impression that they had interrupted some kind of informal rehearsal. 'Still at the theatricals, eh?' he observed, as he came in. 'Go on, don't let us disturb you. Capital, capital!' 'Langton,' whispered the other, pulling him back, 'they're – they're not acting– I'm afraid something's the matter!' and the two waited to gather some idea of what was happening.

Before Mark could reply, if he meant to reply, to Mabel's appeal, Vincent had anticipated him. 'Mrs. Ashburn – Mabel,' he said, 'you are right to trust in his honour – it is not true. I can explain everything.'

The instant joy and relief in her face as she clung fondly to Mark's arm repaid him and gave him strength and courage to go on. Mark looked round with a stunned wonder. What could be said or done to save him now? he thought. Vincent was mad to try. But the latter put his hand, as if affectionately, on his shoulder with a warning pressure, and he said nothing.

'Do you mean,' said Caffyn to Holroyd, with an angry sneer, 'that I told a lie – that you did not write "Illusion"?'

'That was not the lie,' returned Vincent. 'I did write "Illusion." It is untrue that Mr. Ashburn's conduct in the matter does him anything but credit. May I tell my story here, Mrs. Featherstone?'

'Oh, by all means,' said that lady, not too graciously: 'we can't know the facts too soon.'

'I wrote the book,' said Vincent, 'before I went out to Ceylon. I was at the Bar then, and had thoughts of practising again at some future time. I had a fancy (which was foolish, I dare say) to keep the fact that I had written a novel a close secret. So I entrusted the manuscript to my good friend, Mr. Ashburn, leaving him to arrange, if he could, for its publication, and I charged him to keep my secret by every means in his power. In fact, I was so much in earnest about it that I made him give me his solemn promise that, if he could not shield me in any other way, he would do so with his own name. I did not really believe then that that would be necessary, or even that the book would be accepted, but I knew Mr. Ashburn wrote novels himself, and I hoped the arrangement would not do him any actual harm.'

Till then he had gone on fluently enough; it was merely a modification of his original idea, with a considerable blending of the actual facts, but he felt that there were difficulties to come which it would require all his skill to avoid.

'I was detained, as you know, for more than a year in Ceylon, and unable most of the time to write to England,' he continued. 'When I came home, I found – I was told that the book had obtained a success neither of us ever dreamed of: curiosity had been aroused, and Mr. Ashburn had found himself driven to keep his promise. He – he was anxious that I should release him and clear the matter up. I – I – it was not convenient for me to do so just then, and I induced him – he could hardly refuse, perhaps – to keep up the disguise a little longer. We had just arranged to make everything known shortly, when Mr. Caffyn anticipated us. And that is really all there is to tell about that.'

Throughout Vincent's explanation Caffyn had been inwardly raging at the thought that his victims might actually succeed in escaping after all. Forcing an indulgent laugh, he said, 'My dear fellow, it's very kind and generous of you to say all that, and it sounds very pretty and almost probable, but you can't expect us seriously to believe it, you know!'

For an instant this remark appeared to produce a reaction; but it vanished at Vincent's reply. His pale worn face flushed angrily as he faced him.

'No one seriously expects you to believe in such things as honour and friendship!' he said contemptuously. 'I am going to deal with your share in this now. Mrs. Featherstone,' he added, 'will you forgive me if I am obliged to pain you by anything I may have to say? That man has thought fit to bring a disgraceful charge against my friend here – it is only right that you should know how little he deserves credit!'

Secretly Mrs. Featherstone was only too glad to see Caffyn discomfited, but all she did was to say stiffly, 'Oh, pray don't consider my feelings, Mr. Holroyd!'

Vincent's indignation was enough in itself to make him merciless, and then, as a matter of policy, he was determined to disable the enemy to the utmost. Everything that had come to his knowledge of Caffyn's proceedings he now exposed with biting irony. He told the story of the letter, suppressed to all appearances out of gratuitous malice, and of the cruel terrorism exercised over little Dolly; he showed how Caffyn had tried to profit by his supposed discovery of the fraud, and how Mark had studiously refrained from undeceiving him, and gave a damaging description of the sordid threats and proposals he had himself received that evening. 'This is the high-minded gentleman who, acting under a keen sense of duty, has chosen to denounce Mr. Ashburn just now,' he concluded.

The victory was won. Caffyn's face was livid as he heard him – he had never foreseen such black ingratitude as this, and it upset all his calculations. He still had his doubts, after so many careful experiments, that the story of Vincent's was a fabrication, even though it was not absolutely inconsistent with what he had observed, and he could see no motive for shielding the culprit. But it was plain that every one there believed it – Vincent's word would be taken before his – he was thoroughly beaten.

No one had seen Gilda come in, but she had been standing for some time with red eyes and flushed face by one of the windows, and in the general stir which followed Vincent's explanation Mr. Featherstone came up to her.

'Well,' he said, 'we've been treated to a very pretty story this evening. This is the young gentleman you're going to give me for a son-in-law, is it, Gilda? But of course you don't believe a word against him!'

'I believe it all – and more!' she said with a passionate sob.

Caffyn turned to her. 'You too, Gilda!' he cried pathetically.

'You might have deceived me even after this,' she said, 'only – mamma sent me to go and fetch you – I heard you out there on the balcony, talking to Mabel, and – and I went out by the other window, this one, and along the balcony to the corner – '

'And, in point of fact, you listened!' he said.

'Yes, I did,' she retorted, 'and I shall be glad of it all my life. I heard enough to save me from you!'

She left him there and flew to Mabel, whom she embraced with a remorseful hug.

'You darling!' she whispered, 'what a wicked fool I was ever to be jealous of you – and about him. You will forgive me, won't you? And I am so glad about poor dear Mr. Ashburn.'

Mr. Featherstone tapped Caffyn lightly on the shoulder.

'Well, Master Harold,' he said, 'have you got anything to say? With all this suppressing, and plotting, and bullying, and threatening, and the rest of it – it strikes me you have made a d – d fool of yourself!'

The same idea had already occurred to Caffyn. He had been admirably cool and cautious; he had devoted all his energies to securing Mabel's marriage to Mark; he had watched and waited and sprung his mine with every precaution – and he was the only person it had blown up! His schemes had failed exactly like a common fool's – which was painful to reflect upon.

'If I haven't,' he said with a slight grimace, 'I've been made to look very like one.'

'You're more rogue than fool, after all,' observed the merchant, with distressing candour; 'and, by the way, I'm rather particular about getting all my correspondence, and I invariably prefer to burn my own letters. I don't think my offices are quite the place for such a gifted young fellow as you seem to be.'

'You mean I'm to go?' said Caffyn.

'I do,' was the reply. 'I never will have any one about me I can't trust. I did think once – but that's over – you heard what my girl said to you! – we'd better part now. I won't deny I'm sorry!'

'Not sorrier than I am, I'll swear!' said Caffyn, with a short laugh. 'Good-bye, Mrs. Featherstone,' he added to that lady, who stood by. 'You're not sorry, are you? Gilda will be a duchess after all – now!'

And he left the house, feeling as he passed out that the very footmen by the entrance knew of his discomfiture, and carrying away with him for a lasting recollection Mabel's look of radiant happiness as she heard Mark so completely vindicated.

'Revenge is sweet,' he thought bitterly, 'but I kept mine too long, and it's turned devilish sour!'

'Well, my dear,' said Mr. Featherstone to his wife, 'you've been leaving your other young people to their own devices all this time. Wouldn't it be as well to go and look after them?'

The dancing had been going on in the adjoining room while all this was taking place, now and then the doors had been tried by couples in search of a cool retreat between the waltzes, but no one suspected what important revelations were being made within.

Mrs. Featherstone was deeply mortified. It was true she had got rid of a hated presence, but her play – which she had meant to make the closing event of the season, and by which she had hoped to conquer one or two of the remaining rungs of the social ladder – her play was rendered impossible; this affair would get into the society papers, with every perversion which wit or malice could supply – she would be made thoroughly ridiculous!

'I'll go,' she said. 'I must get rid of everybody as soon as I decently can – this shocking business has completely upset me.'

Mark and Vincent were standing together at the door, and as she passed out she visited some of her pent-up displeasure upon them.

'Well, Mr. Ashburn and Mr. Holroyd,' she said, in tones that were intended to sound playful, 'I hope you are quite contented with your little mystification? Such a very original idea on both your parts, really. How it must have amused you both to see me making such an absurd exhibition of myself all this time. Seriously, though, I do consider I have been very, very shabbily treated – you might have warned me as a friend, Mr. Ashburn, without betraying any one's confidence! No, don't explain, either of you: I could not bear any more explanations just now!'

Mr. Langton, as he followed her, took Mark out with him, and as soon as they were alone gave full vent to his own indignation.

'I don't understand your conceptions of honour,' he said. 'Whatever your duty might be to Vincent, you clearly had duties towards my daughter and myself. Do you suppose I should have given her to you if I had known? It just comes to this, and no sophistry can get over it – you obtained my consent under false pretences?'

For he was naturally intensely humiliated by the difference these disclosures must make in his daughter's position, and did not spare his son-in-law. He said much more to the same effect, and Mark bore it all without attempting a defence: he still felt a little stunned by the danger he had passed through, and, after all, he thought, what he had heard now was nothing to what might have been said to him!

Obeying a glance from Mabel, as the others followed Mrs. Featherstone back to the music-room, Vincent had remained behind.

'When will you allow this to be generally known?' she asked, and her voice had a strange new coldness which struck him with terror. Had she seen through his device? Was it all useless?

'As soon as possible,' he answered gently. 'We shall see the publishers to-morrow, and then all the details will be arranged.'

'And your triumph will come,' she said bitterly. 'I hope you will be able to enjoy it!'

'Mabel,' he said earnestly, 'Harold Caffyn forced me to speak to-night – surely you saw that? I – I did not intend to claim the book yet.'

'Why didn't you claim it long ago?' she demanded. 'Why must you put this burden on Mark at all? Surely your secret could have been kept without that! But you came home and knew what a success Mark's (your book, I beg your pardon – it is strange at first, you know) – what a success your book had been, and how hard it was making his life for him – he begged you then, you said, to take back his promise, and you – you would not. Oh, it was selfish, Vincent, cruelly selfish of you!'

His sole concern in making that hasty explanation had been to give it an air of reasonable probability: he had never given a thought till that moment of the light in which he was presenting his own conduct. Now, in one terrible instant, it rushed upon him with an overwhelming force.

'I – I acted for the best,' he said; and even to himself the words sounded like a sullen apology.

'For your best!' she said. 'The book will be talked of more than ever now. But did you never think of the false position in which you were placing Mark? What will become of him after this? People might have read his books once – they will never read them now – they may even say that – that Harold Caffyn may have been right. And all that is your work, Vincent!'

He groaned within him at his helplessness; he stood before her with bowed head, not daring to raise his eyes, lest he should be tempted to undo all his work.

'I was proud of Mark,' she continued, 'because I thought he had written "Illusion." I am prouder now – it is better to be loyal and true, as Mark has been, than to write the noblest book and sacrifice a friend to it. There are better things than fame, Vincent!'

Even his devotion was not proof against this last injustice; he raised his head, and anger burnt in his eyes.

'You tell me that!' he cried passionately. 'As if I had ever cared for Fame in itself! Mabel, you have no right to say these things to me – do you hear? – no right! Have some charity, try and believe that there may be excuses even for me – that if you could know my motives you might feel you had been unjust!'

'Is there anything I don't know?' she asked, somewhat moved by this outburst, 'anything you have kept from me?'

'No. You have heard all I have to say – all there is to tell,' he admitted.

'Then I am not unjust!' she said; 'but if you feel justified in acting as you have done, so much the better for you, and we shall do no good by talking any more about it.'

'None whatever,' he agreed.

When he was alone that night he laughed fiercely to himself at the manner in which his act of devotion had been accepted. All his sacrifices had ended in making Mabel despise him for calculating selfishness; he had lost her esteem for ever.

If he had foreseen this, he might have hesitated, deep and unselfish as his love was; but it was done, and he had saved her. Better, he tried to think, that she should despise him, than lose her belief in her husband, and, with it, all that made life fair to her.

But altruism of this kind is a cold and barren consolation. Men do good by stealth now and then, men submit to misconstruction, but then it is always permitted to them to dream that, some day, an accident may bring the good or the truth to light. This was a hope which, by the nature of the case, Vincent could never entertain, and life was greyer to him even than before.

CHAPTER XL.

THE EFFECTS OF AN EXPLOSION

MRS. FEATHERSTONE made no attempt to detain Mark and Mabel as they took leave of her shortly after that scene in the Gold Room, though her attitude at parting was conceived in a spirit of frosty forgiveness.

In the carriage Mark sat silent for some time, staring straight before him, moodily waiting for Mabel's first words. He had not to wait long; she had laid her hand softly upon his, and as he turned, he saw that her eyes were wet and shining. 'Mark,' she said, 'it is you I love, not that book; and now, when I know all it has cost you – oh, my dear, my dear – did you think it would make me love you less?'

He could not answer her by words, but he drew her nearer to him till her head rested upon his shoulder, and so they sat, silent, with hands clasped, until they reached home.

Seldom again, and only under strong compulsion, did Mabel make any reference to 'Illusion,' nor was it till long after that he suspected the depth and reason of her resentment against Vincent – he was content to feel that her love for himself was unchanged.

But though she strove, and successfully, to hide it from her husband, this lowering of her ideal caused her a secret anguish; it had always been difficult to reconcile Mark as his nature seemed revealed in private life, with the Mark who had written 'Illusion.' One of her dreams had been that, as their intimacy grew, all reserve would vanish, and he would speak to her of his inmost thoughts and fancies, which it seemed almost as if he thought her unable to appreciate as yet.

Now all this was over, there were no hidden depths to fathom in his mind, no sublime heights to which she could rise; such as she knew him now, he was and must remain – not a strong and solitary genius with lofty thoughts of which he feared to speak freely, not a guide on whom she could lean unquestioning through life, only a man with a bright but shallow nature, impulsive and easily led. Even the Quixotic honour which had led him to entangle himself in complications at another's bidding showed a mind incapable of clear judgment – or he would have renounced the rash promise when it began to involve others. Sadly enough she realised the weakness implied in this, and yet it only infused a new element of pity and protection in the love she felt for him, and she adapted herself bravely to the changed conditions of her life.

After Holroyd had spoken, she had never questioned that his version was the true one, and Caffyn's charge an infamous fabrication – whatever she might have been driven to think in that one instant of sickening doubt.

To a more suspicious nature, perhaps, some of the facts connected with Vincent's visit to Laufingen might even then have presented difficulties, but if Mabel had remembered all that had occurred there more clearly than she did, she would have attached but little importance to it. The loyal faith she had in her husband's honour would have accepted as obvious a far less plausible explanation.

On the day following the rehearsal Messrs. Chilton and Fladgate were made aware of the facts relating to the authorship of 'Illusion,' whereupon they both expressed a not unnatural annoyance at having been, as they considered, made the victims of a deception. Mr. Fladgate, especially, who had always prided himself immensely upon the sagacity which had led him to detect Mark at once, and who had never wearied of telling the story, indulged in some strong observations.

Vincent vindicated as well as he could the scheme in which he was the most guiltless of accessories after the fact, and Mark kept in the background and said as little as possible; he felt distinctly uncomfortable, however, when Mr. Chilton drily inquired whether the same mystification attached to 'Sweet Bells Jangled,' and on being reassured as to this, observed that it was a little unfortunate that the matter had not been explained before the latter book had been brought out. 'If you think you are prejudiced in any way,' Mark said, flushing angrily, 'we can easily come to some other arrangement!' 'Oh,' said Mr. Chilton, 'I was not thinking of it from a pecuniary point of view exactly – we shall not lose much – as far as money is concerned, I dare say!'

'My partner,' explained Mr. Fladgate, 'was thinking of the results this will have upon our reputation in the trade;' on which Vincent tried to appease him by promising to make it abundantly clear that the firm were no parties to the concealment, and as soon as the partners understood that it was not proposed to disturb any existing arrangements respecting 'Illusion,' beyond disclosing the truth, and having some necessary revisions inserted in any future edition, they parted amicably enough, though Mark was made to understand his altered standing in the most unmistakable manner.

And in a few days, by means which it is not necessary to particularise here, the version of the affair given by Vincent at Grosvenor Gardens was made known to all those who might find it of interest.

The announcement, when it became generally known, caused a certain amount of surprise and remark, but not nearly so much as might have been expected. Hawthorne, in his preface to the 'Scarlet Letter,' has remarked the utter insignificance of literary achievements and aims beyond the narrow circle which recognises them as important and legitimate, and the lesson the discovery of this is to the man who dreams of literary fame. If Vincent needed to learn that lesson, he learnt it then; no fresh laurels were brought out for him – and the old ones had withered already; people were beginning to feel slightly ashamed of their former raptures over 'Illusion,' or had transferred them to a newer object, and they could not be revived in cold blood, even for the person legitimately entitled. Jacob had intercepted the birthright, and for this Esau there was not even the réchauffé of a blessing.

The people who had lionised Mark were enraged now, and chiefly with Holroyd; the more ill-natured hinted that there was something shady on both sides – or why should all that secrecy have been necessary? – but the less censorious were charitably disposed to think that Ashburn's weak good-nature had been unscrupulously abused by his more gifted friend.

Vincent's conduct, if it showed nothing more than a shrinking from notoriety, was sufficiently offensive, such distaste being necessarily either cynical or hypocritical. So upon the whole, the reaction which attends all sudden and violent popularity, and which had already set in here, was, if anything, furthered by the disclosure.

But this did not greatly distress him. Neglect and fame were alike to him, now that his lady had withdrawn her countenance from him. He had resigned himself to the loss of the fairest dream of his life, but it had been a consolation to him in his loneliness to feel that he might be her friend still, that he might see her sometimes, that though she could never love him, he would always possess her confidence and regard – not much of a consolation, perhaps, to most men, but he had found a sort of comfort in it. Now that was all over, and his solitude was left more desolate still; he knew there was no appeal for him, and that, so long as Mabel believed that he had sacrificed her husband to his deliberate selfishness, she would never relent towards him. There were times when he asked himself if he was bound to suffer all this misconception from the one woman he had ever loved – but he knew always that in clearing himself he would lay her happiness in ruins, and resolved to bear his burden to the end, sustained by the conviction, which every day became clearer, that he would not have to bear it much longer.